Word.ws English Dictionary

nanny states

nanny states is the plural of nanny state.

Meaning of nanny state

Noun

nanny state (plural nanny states)

  1. (derogatory) A state whose government institutions are authoritative and over-paternalistic, interfering with and controlling people's lives.
    • Scapegoating an impotent government (running around to clean up the messes made by its business friends) arises from bad faith, from a continuing hostility to the Nanny State that nevertheless goes alongside a refusal to accept the consequences of the sidelining of government in global capitalism...2009, Mark Fisher, chapter 8, in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Zero Books, →ISBN, page 63

Questions about nanny states

What is nanny states the plural of?
Nanny states is the plural of nanny state.

Words near nanny states in the dictionary

  1. nanny nanny boo boo
  2. Nanny of the Maroons
  3. nanny shop
  4. nanny shops
  5. nanny state
  6. nanny states
  7. nanny-goat
  8. nanny-goats
  9. nannyberries
  10. nannyberry
  11. nannybot

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: nanny states (page history and authors); nanny state (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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